Joe Biden is continuing to preside over an inflationary economy, with prices for key items rising again last month after the president said they were “coming down” during his State of the Union address.
“The Consumer Price Index rose 6.4% between January 2022 and January 2023 as price pressure from household staples such as food and shelter remains elevated, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” the Daily Wire reported on Tuesday, citing federal data. “The month-to-month increase of 0.5% exceeded analysts’ forecasts, while core inflation, which factors out the more volatile food and energy categories, rose 0.4%, also surpassing expectations. Food prices increased 0.5% and shelter prices increased 0.7% even as energy prices rose 2.0%.”
Bankrate Chief Financial Analyst Greg McBride told the outlet in reference to the increases: “The pace of disinflation has slowed, and if a 0.5% monthly increase in headline and 0.4% in core prices are what passes for progress, we have low expectations.”
Fox Business noted: “Annually prices remain above 6% but are down sharply from the 9.1% surge in June, which marked the highest inflation rate in almost 41 years. Still, inflation is expected to remain roughly three times higher than the pre-pandemic average on an annualized basis, underscoring the persistent financial burden placed on millions of U.S. households by high prices.”
Meanwhile, Biden is being ripped for pushing a tax increase that economists are already warning will harm middle-class earners the most.
Wall Street expert and Princeton University economics professor Burton Malkiel told Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow on Monday that Biden’s plan to raise taxes and levies on corporate stock buybacks will have a tremendously bad effect on low-to-middle-class Americans.
“What people don’t realize is that, sure, poor people don’t own a lot of stock directly, they own very little. But most of us all own stock indirectly through our 401(k),” he explained. “These are the people who are going to be hurt. It’s all the mutual funds that we all own, that own a lot of stock.”
Biden pushed the typical Democratic lie during his State of the Union speech that the wealthiest Americans don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes when proposed raising them on billionaires and quadrupling the corporate stock buyback levy.
“I’m a capitalist. But just pay your fair share,” Biden said in the speech. “And I think a lot of you at home agree with me that our present tax system is simply unfair.”
Malkiel warned that’s “just wrong,” and more penalties for stock buybacks are anti-capitalist.
“In fact, it almost all goes back into the system, and it goes back into the system in a particularly efficient way because companies buy back their stock when they don’t have good investment opportunities,” he said. “And by giving the money back in buybacks, that money flows back into the stock market in newer companies, in entrepreneurial companies. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that you want from a capitalist system.”
